when they brought over the few and fewer husbands whose wives were
staying down simply because they hated to go up and begin the social
life of the winter. The people who had thronged the grassy-bordered
paths of the village dwindled in number; the riding and driving on the
roads was less and less; the native life showed itself more in the
sparsity of the sojourners. The sweet fern in the open fields, and the
brakes and blackberry-vines among the bowlders, were blighted with the
cold wind; even the sea-weed swaying at the foot of the rocks seemed to
feel a sharper chill than that of the brine. A storm came, and strewed
the beach with kelp, and blew over half the bath-houses; and then the
hardiest lingerer ceased to talk of staying through October. There began
to be rumors at the Maxwells' hotel that it would close before the month
was out; some ladies pressed the landlord for the truth, and he
confessed that he expected to shut the house by the 25th. This spread
dismay; but certain of the boarders said they would go to the other
hotels, which were to keep open till October. The dependent cottages had
been mostly emptied before; those who remained in them, if they did not
go away, came into the hotel. The Maxwells themselves did this at last,
for the sake of the warmth and the human companionship around the
blazing hearth-fires in the parlors. They got a room with a stove in it,
so that he could write; and there was a pensive, fleeting coziness in it
all, with the shrinking numbers in the vast dining-room grouped at two
or three tables for dinner, and then gathered in the light of the
evening lamps over the evening papers. In these conditions there came,
if not friendship, an intensification of acquaintance, such as is
imaginable of a company of cultured castaways. Ladies who were not quite
socially certain of one another in town gossiped fearlessly together;
there was whist among the men; more than once it happened that a young
girl played or sang by request, and not, as so often happens where a
hotel is full, against the general desire. It came once to a wish that
Mr. Maxwell would read something from his play; but no one had the
courage to ask him. In society he was rather severe with women, and his
wife was not sorry for that; she made herself all the more approachable
because of it. But she discouraged the hope of anything like reading
from him; she even feigned that he might not like to do it without
consulting Mr. G